Monday, June 6, 2011

In the previous post, or series of posts (how to improve software testing), I am writing about how to improve the abilities of a person who does testing. In this article, I will provide some more details about what a tester can do to improve their skills in this post:
- Learning about scripting. Scripting is one technique that is beneficial to tester in many ways. There are many applications and software that have a testing interface. Being able to use these scripting interfaces can help automate some of the work of a tester; further, it is not necessary that time for this activity would be budgeted as part of the regular product activities. A tester can increase the amount of time available for regular testing and reduce the time spent on repetitive testing by using options such as Scripting. Knowledge of scripting is also useful for helping out in many of the activities of the tester on a regular basis.
- Automation. Automation is one of the techniques that ensures that continuous and repetitive tasks can be done through a software application rather than a tester doing it. Automation ensures a higher amount of coverage, and you have the option of setting up a list of automation test cases which ensure that a certain percentage of test cases can be run every day when the new build comes in. However, automation is not everyone's cup of team. Automation is typically done by those team members who have shown interest in learning about automation techniques, or those who have shown some interest in scripting (and this is normally seem to be present in people rather than all the team members being asked about whether they would prefer to do scripting or automation testing).
- Being able to adapt to new methodologies. New methodologies such as Agile, Scrum, etc have made it into the software development community and it makes sense for testers to know about these technologies (they can show the lead to their team for such methodologies) and not seem to act such that they are standing in the way of such methodologies.